Chapter 13

I took some time to recover, after going back down to make sure the doors had closed up behind me. I looked apprehensively at the entrance to the fourth floor, wondering what other messed up surprises this place could have in store for me. Once I felt that I had recovered as much as I was going to, I approached the stairs, resummoning the light hanging above my head.

As I slowly walked up the stairs, I thought to myself about my firebolts. The more I used them, the better I got at them; not just my aim, but how quickly I could summon them, and, to a degree, how damaging they were. It was as if the more comfortable I became with them, the more solid, more powerful they became. Coming up to the next floor, I decided that a couple of my emergency moves needed practice.

Reaching the fourth floor’s landing, I turned to face the occupants of the room, seeing four of the Writhing Soldiers… and a third reanimated Puppet, this one clad in blood-stained robes and leaning heavily on a staff tipped with an ice-blue crystal. I summoned up a firebolt in my right hand, extending my left hand out in front of me, palm out, fingers splayed. I pointed my hand toward the nearest of them, an Axeman that anchored the end of their line, moving along the wall to make sure he engaged me first. As he stepped forward into his swing, I pushed my will into my left hand, and threw a barrier of flames forward from it, snapping into place just in time to block the swing. The shield broke under the impact, its’ destruction blowing the Axeman back a step and robbing the axe of all of its’ force. When a Footsoldier stepped into the gap, sword reaching out before him, I conjured another barrier, this time pushing back right as the sword struck.

The sword flew across the room as the barrier erupted, burning away the gauntleted hands of the Footsoldier and dropping him to one knee. Seizing the opening, I slammed my firebolt into the front of its’ helmet, dunking the projectile into its’ chest like the gorget was a basketball hoop. I dodged backward quickly as the Axeman delivered a vertical strike, unwilling to test my shield against the force of the falling axe head. Instead, I decided it was time to switch to practicing my other rarely used ability.

I focused on the feeling of a firebolt inside of my right hand, and then squashed it, the fire wrapping around my fist in a wreath of flames. I struck downward with a hard chop, the impact breaking the haft in two as the Axeman attempted to lift it, and the sudden lack of resistance sent him tumbling backward. A Guardsman moved toward me, and attempted a shield bash, which I knew would be followed by a sword strike; or would’ve, if I hadn’t simply punched straight into the middle of the shield, denting it back into its’ cuirass and sending it reeling. I turned to address the Axeman, only to be reminded of something else very pressing.

The Writhing Puppet with the staff pointed it straight toward me, and a flurry of exaggerated, apple-sized snowflakes launched from it, a half-dozen of them in a cone-shaped spread. I moved to dodge away, only to find my feet coming out from under me. As I landed on the suddenly very chilly stone floor, I realized there was a ring of ice reaching out from the Puppet’s feet, by this point covering most of the room. I tried to stand up and ended up just throwing myself onto my shoulder, grunting from the impact. The Writhing Soldiers gathered around me, interrupting the Mage’s line of sight. I could see him hold his staff at the ready, more of those snowflakes swirling around him, cutting through the air like razor discs.

I placed my hands down on the ice, and shoved myself upward, pushing my will down, and small blasts of flame erupted from my open palms, melting the ice beneath me even as it propelled me up to my feet. The freezing water soaked the bottom of my robe, almost painful where it touched skin. I began hurling firebolts at the Soldiers, attempting to drive them back and clear a path to the Mage. While they were still effective up close, I found their energy scattering the farther from me they went, losing coherence before they could reach the Ice Mage. The sensation of cold in the air was oppressive, dampening my flames. I could feel how much more energy it took to form them, the extra fraction of a second of concentration it cost me. It felt like the cold itself had taken on a presence, or been imbued with energy. Imbued with energy. The thought struck me like a niggling revelation, and it took another few seconds of careful evasion before I decided upon a counter-strategy. I pulled the wand from my waist, and, instead of releasing the flames in an uncontrolled torrent, I grabbed the heat of the flames, and drew it outward, describing a circle in the air with the wand a couple of times. It created a bubble of heat around myself, counteracting the oppressive cold. That wasn’t enough for me. I poured fire out of the wand, grabbing onto the heat and spraying it outward. If he could fill the room with his magic, so could I; unlike the Puppet, my magic wasn’t limited by whatever effect allowed the vines to reanimate them. I could see the water beginning to bubble around my feet as I poured as much heat into the room as I could, fighting back the oppressive cold, melting the ice on the ground and turning it into bubbling puddles. I felt my energy draining rapidly despite the wand’s assistance, and decided on one big finale to end the fight.

I pushed my hands together in front of me, summoning two firebolts in the same space. They merged, and the flames began to swirl and roil with a sense of danger and instability. I lifted my hands, finding the magic between them bound them together as if in wires, the flames within hot enough to hurt my hands, the sensation like a sunburn. I mentally selected the mage, and my fingers parted, making a small hole in the cage.

The fireball that erupted from it was unlike anything I had used before; it was a slow moving inferno twisting in the air, constrained within an orb of magic, the flames violently trying to tear through the thin sheen of magic and be unleashed on the outside world. When it drew close to the Mage, I allowed that bubble to burst.

For an instant, the room was nothing but light and heat, the water flashing to steam around me, scalding my flesh beneath the robes, before it dissipated entirely. Of the writhing soldiers, nothing remained but their armor, sizzling where it touched the stone. The Mage was unrecognizable, his staff lying at his feet, the wood charred black and the crystal a dull grey. My chest heaved as I tried to breathe in the thick, humid air, my body scalded inside and out by the surge of steam. While I was mostly immune to the effects of my own fire, apparently that didn’t extend to other elements, the addition of water enough to bypass my innate resistance. Everything ached, not just from the burns, but from within; my muscles felt sore and overdrawn, and there was an ephemeral ache in my bones that felt like I had overexerted even my soul. I could feel a trickle of magic returning to me, but it was agonizingly slow; rivulets trying to fill a lake. My legs ached and trembled, and my hands shook uncontrollably. I had only moments to ponder on how much I must’ve overused my power, before I toppled over to the floor, darkness hitting me before the stones.

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When I awoke, I could hear shouts and the sound of fighting from above me. Above? I pulled myself shakily to my feet, the sense of depletion and soreness mostly faded, though I could sense that my magic was still rather weak. I took the mana potion from my belt, carefully uncorking it, and swallowing down the contents. Healing had tasted like a growing forest, but mana had a flavor that somehow reminded me of sitting in the woods on a cool, clear night, with the damp clutch of fog brushing against my skin. How, exactly, something could taste like tranquility was a concept I wasn’t sure I would ever quite grasp, but it did its’ work, the tiny trickle of liquid pouring into my mana pool like a torrent of snowmelt, filling me with a refreshing sensation that drove away the bone-deep ache.

That dealt with, I stood straighter and looked around, trying to determine the source of the sound. I conjured the torchlight above my head once more, and pulled a firebolt into my right hand, taking the stairs two at a time until I reached the fifth floor. Unlike the tower I had climbed, this one had another normal battle for the fifth floor, and the remains of the Writhing Soldiers laid here and there like broken dolls. The sixth floor was much the same; no Writhing Puppets joined the ancient bodies on the floor, each of them disassembled as thoroughly as a butcher taking apart chicken. I heard a scream of pain from the next floor above, and the sound of someone begging for mercy. I was already halfway up the stairs when I heard an immense meaty impact that put an end to the begging. The seventh floor had a doorway much like the boss floor of the first tower, but the door was already open. I could see a human arm sticking through the doorway, as if reaching for something. Or someone.

There was a woman hidden inside the doorway, her hand clamped over her mouth, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, just out of sight from the room. She was clearly sobbing, her whole body shaking with the effort of keeping silent, staring at the unmoving hand that had been reaching toward her. Red hair hung lank around her face, blood matting it together on the side near me. I saw the arm slowly retreat into the room as if being dragged, accompanied by the rustling hiss of clothes being dragged across stone, and she choked out a single, soft cry as it vanished from sight. The dragging stopped, and the sound of armored footsteps slowly drew closer. She gave another soft, breathless sob, eyes shut tight against her impending doom.

It was stupid to just charge into a situation that had clearly already ended badly for possibly several someone elses, but I’d have to fight the guy anyway, and it wasn’t in my nature to stand by and watch people die, especially if they hadn’t done anything to me.

I came through the door with a shield of flames on my left hand and a fistful of fire in my right. I was greeted by the sight of an enormous, towering figure clad in what appeared to be armor made of vines and bark, his enormous fists gnarled and knotted like the trunk of a tree. Long vines reached out from his back like spider legs, three of them currently occupied dragging corpses over to an overgrown corner, thick trails of blood marking where they had fallen in battle. Ponderously, its’ head-sized left hand swung toward me, and I met the punch with my flaming shield.

The shield popped like a soap bubble and the hand kept coming, forcing me to drop flat, landing atop the body of a once-handsome blonde-haired corpse, a solidly-built man dressed in leather armor studded with small metal plates. I rolled off of him even as the monstrous man’s foot arrived, the kick flinging the corpse across the room to strike the wall with bone-shattering force. “Oh, shit,” I shouted as I avoided another swing, thankful that the attacks were slow enough to make them easily avoidable.

My mind changed abruptly when I felt a couple of vines wrap around my left ankle, the spider-like legs behind his back shifting to attack, leaving the other bodies where they lay. The vine pulled me toward him even as he punched, and only a quick firebolt at the vines wrapping my ankle gave me enough room to jump backward away from him. Two more vines attacked my right ankle, and another two my right wrist, trying to prevent me from striking at them again. I wrapped my left hand in flame and chopped at the vines on my other hand, cutting through them, only to have another pair grab my left wrist and forcefully start to twist me, the vines extending to wrap around me. I felt the coming sense of danger from behind me as the monstrous tree-man wound up for a strike, and for a moment, I was certain I was going to die, bracing myself against the crushing agony I felt was coming.

Instead, I felt the vines go slack suddenly and the tree-man stagger, roaring with pain and rage. I turned around, and the woman was wielding the blonde man’s ornate scimitar. The vines writhing on the floor in front of her, and the absence on the tree-man’s back told the story; she had snuck up behind him and slashed through the vines at the base, setting me free just in time to avoid the descending fist of the monstrous tree-man.

“Come on,” she said to me, her voice hoarse and choked with sorrow. Her bright green eyes and straight auburn hair framed a face that would’ve been quite distracting, except for the tear-streaks and puffy eyes. “We need to take him down before he reanimates the others.”

She was right. Even now, I could see the two bodies that had been pulled close enough to the corner being wrapped in vines, some of the smaller tendrils creeping into their open wounds.